November 2018

11/29/2018

For some time plant specimens in the U.S. National Herbarium have been mysteriously moving from one case to another. Sometimes the event would happen early in the morning, other times it would happen over the weekend. Whole plant families would simply appear in a new position in the herbarium.

On a recent weekend, early on a Sunday morning, the mystery was solved. Mark Strong and Carol Kelloff have been shifting during their “off” hours to help make way for the rearrangement of the herbarium into a modified APG-IV (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) format. Evidently, the two of them can shift 35 cases in four hours working at top speed. The latest impediment to implementing the new system was the Lauraceae, and it is now in its “forever home.” Space is now ready for the next family to move.

Congratulations to both of them and thanks are extended for the extra effort. But one wonders, where will these shifty shifters strike next?

11/26/2018

Israel Lopes da Cunha Neto, a doctoral student from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, is a recipient of a 2018 Jose Cuatrecasas Travel Award. He visited the US National Herbarium in August to work on his project, “Diversity and evolution of the vascular system in Nyctaginaceae.” His research aims at integrating data on the ontogeny and anatomy of the vascular system of Nyctaginaceae stems within a phylogenetic context in order to understand its development, diversity, distribution, and evolution.

During Cunha Neto’s visit, he examined, sampled, and carried out anatomical analysis of wood specimens from the Nyctaginaceae family obtained from the Wood Collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History stored in the Museum Support Center (MSC) in Suitland, Maryland. He selected 46 of the 130 Nyctaginaceae specimens to sample. While working in the Plant Anatomy Lab under the supervision of Stanley Yankowski, he sectioned, stained, and mounted slides of the samples, which are now part of the US slide collection. At the University of São Paulo, Cunha Neto will continue to work on the remaining specimens that he did not process during his visit, and he will send duplicate slides back to NMNH. This objective also included analysing microslides from the US wood collection, both from Nyctaginaceae and other related families from the order Caryophyllales.

Another objective of Cunha Neto’s visit was to study the Nyctaginaceae collection of pressed specimens to familiarize himself with plants he had not collected, enrich his database and select localities for his forthcoming field trips to collect fresh material for anatomical studies. With proper authorization, he sampled stem portions from 14 voucher specimens, which will also be useful for his anatomical study.

Cunha Neto is grateful for his visit and remarks that his research experience abroad “added immense benefits to [his] dreamed career as a botanist, and to [his] aspiration of becoming a distinguished researcher in the field of Botany.” He feels that this opportunity has contributed to the knowledge of the Nyctaginaceae flora both anatomically and phylogenetically.

11/20/2018

Department of Botany intern Fiona Miller from Smith College worked with Vicki Funk during the summer of 2018. During her 10 weeks at NMNH she contributed to the Smithsonian Women in Science project (part of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiativehttps://womenshistory.si.edu/). Before she arrived some of the curators in the Smithsonian science bureaus (NMNH, SERC, STRI) along with Pam Henson and Effie Kapsalis (Smithsonian Archives) had created a spreadsheet with the names and available information for all the women who had worked as curators in the various units. Miller had two main goals, 1) complete the spreadsheet (depending on available information) and 2) select a subset of the women to develop or improve existing Wikipedia pages.

Botany intern Fiona Miller

Miller gathered information using a variety of resources including Smithsonian Archives and Smithsonian Libraries and, of course, she used internet searches. She also conducted interviews with some of the women and some of the older retired curators.

The goal of the Wiki pages is to make women in science at the Smithsonian more visible to the public. Miller felt that while some women such as Mary Agnes Chase (NMNH Botanist & Suffragette) had received attention, many other women at the Smithsonian had not been as recognized for their work as their male colleagues. She was glad to make a few more of the women known.

Miller found that women in the early 1900s were not always hired as scientists but as aids and secretaries for male colleagues. She found it interesting to see the different career tracks these women took to navigate the scientific world to find jobs and opportunities. She wrote, rewrote, and edited over 15 Wikipedia pages for women in the museum, some whom are currently employed, but she also used the Archives to locate information on a few that were at NMNH about a hundred years ago. In addition, she started the beginning stages of about 60 more women’s Wiki pages.

Miller is just starting her junior year at Smith College majoring in Italian with a minor in Archive Studies. She is headed to Florence, Italy, for a year of study and will return to Smith for her senior year.

11/19/2018

On 1 August, Liz Zimmer, W. Carl Taylor, Peter Schafran, Destiny Waag, Shruti Dube, Erika Gardner, Steven Canty. Julia Steier, and Fiona Miller worked with Gabriel Johnson to lead an introductory botany class to a group of 21 local high school students. To learn how to take proper field notes and collect plant specimens, each group of 3-4 students was paired with a botanist mentor and they searched the gardens surrounding the National Museum of Natural History to find plants in the family Lamiaceae. Each group brought their specimen back to the Q?rius lab where they learned how to use a dichotomous key to determine the name of the particular lamiaceous plant they found.

Each group made pressings in a plant press, and then received pre-pressed specimens of their plants to mount. They got hands-on experience to appreciate the science and art of plant mounting and how to prepare a proper specimen label. They observed fresh specimens of their plants under stereoscopes to learn about glandular trichomes and to get an appreciation of the diversity if minute insect fauna that are inadvertently collected with the plants.

Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla showed the students pre-prepared SEM stubs of the same species they collected to see the unique epideram feature of their plants in high resolution. Hurtado Padilla also presented the students with electron micrographs of the trichomes photographed in 3-D and could be observed with red and blue 3-D glasses. While this was transpiring, the students enjoyed comparing their plants to the other mint family plants collected by the other groups to get a good understanding of the morphological feature that define this family.

In a great cloud of water vapor, a large mortar of Scutellaria ovata leaves was flash frozen in liquid nitrogen and ground to a fine powder. The students then scooped samples of this powder into tubes of lysis buffer to see how plant tissue is processed in a molecular lab. After centrifuging the tubes of "green goo," the students learned to differentiate a supernatant from a pellet and they carefully transferred their supernatants into a vial of precipitation buffer. With plenty of “ooohs” and “ahhs,” they saw the "webbing" formed by the DNA molecules isolated in this solution.

The students also spoke with Department of Botany fellows and staff about their careers and current research projects.

11/15/2018

The American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) has selected Vicki Funk as its 2018 Asa Gray Award recipient. The prestigious award—named after arguably the most influential North American Botanist of the 19th century—recognizes lifetime achievement in plant systematics.

Funk was selected for the award following nominations and supporting letters submitted from 18 botanical and systematic experts. The primary nominators—Dennis Stevenson, Chelsea Specht, and Warren Wagner—indicate that “Dr. Funk epitomizes the most meritorious type of scientist for the Asa Gray award: an indefatigable and innovative evolutionary biologist, a field and herbarium botanist, a pure taxonomist, and an enthusiastic mentor.” In support of Funk, they continue, “Her career hallmarks include prolific and transformative research, innovations to the ways we do systematic botany … significant contributions to plant taxonomy rules and regulations, mentoring of a continuous stream of young botanists, and contributing to the excellence of [ASPT] and its mission in promoting plant systematics and plant taxonomy.”

Indeed, the hallmarks of Funk’s career are noteworthy, including more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and as an editor/author on nine collaborative books. One of these, Systematics, Evolution, and Biogeography of Compositae (2009), is a prominent tome that brought together virtually all the researchers of the world’s largest plant family. The book was the winner of the prestigious Stebbins Medal, demonstrating its high international praise. Funk has also produced many seminal papers on topics such as phylogenetic patterns and hybridization (1985), the highly regarded how-to book The Compleat Cladist (1991), systematic data in biodiversity studies (2002), and the first book using modern phylogenetic approaches in a standardized way to address biogeography on oceanic islands (Hawaiian Biogeography, 1995). For all of the nominators, it is clear that Funk’s name is not only synonymous with Island Biogeography, but her momentous work has also systematically built the foundations on which many plant researcher’s careers have flourished.

11/13/2018

The US National Herbarium typically attracts visiting research scientists interested in examining specimens in their field of study. The herbarium also serves as a destination in education. Undergraduate and graduate students interested in botany, ecology, evolution, molecular biology, and conservation biology have visited the herbarium to understand the importance of museum collections and how the specimens are used in research. This past summer several groups visited the herbarium. Here are two examples.

The second Oak Spring eFLOWER Summer School took place at the Oak Spring Foundation in Upperville, Virginia on September 18–27. The main goal of this Summer School was to provide high-quality training in modern comparative methods used to study macroevolution. The organizers, Hervé Sauquet, Susana Magallón, Jürg Schönenberger, and Peter Crane, hoped that this Summer School would further promote the rapidly evolving field of macroevolution in plant sciences while also conveying their experience in building high-quality morphological datasets. They also sought to inspire the participants to take part in the quest to understand the evolution of angiosperms and their flowers. Using the program PROTEUS, the School included lectures and hands on experience in floral trait data, ancestral state reconstruction, characteristics of early floral diversification, fossil calibration data entry, molecular dating and fossil data entry.

As part of the Summer School the 15 participants and three of their instructors traveled into Washington, DC, on September 23 and spent a day at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). During part of that time, they spent several hours touring the herbarium and having an open discussion about relevant topics such as the importance of biological collections, best practices in collecting samples, and the future of systematics. Participants attended from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico, UK, and the USA (Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin). Invited speakers included Else Marie Friis, Laura Lagomarsion, and Stacey Smith, and from the US National Herbarium, Vicki Funk.

Each summer, the Blandy Experimental Farm of the University of Virginia hosts a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, a residential, 11-week summer program supported by the National Science Foundation. The primary goal of the program is to teach students to formulate testable hypotheses about important ecological and evolutionary questions. The format of the program encourages students to develop skills in experimental design, data collection, analysis, and critical reading of primary scientific literature. Students also learn to prepare and communicate scientific information to other scientists and the general public.

REU undergraduate students from Blandy Experimental Farm (and also a few graduate students, faculty, and technicians) visited the US National Herbarium over the summer.

A feature of the Blandy program is to visit the NMNH to understand the importance of biological collections and how it might relate to their research. On July 13, nine participants and one of their instructors, Mary McKenna (Howard University), had the opportunity to visit the Departments of Botany and Vertebrate Zoology. Gary Krupnick gave a presentation and discussion on how botanical specimens are used in conservation research followed by a tour of the herbarium.

11/09/2018

November 11, 2018, is Veteran’s Day and the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. Armistice Day is commemorated to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany for the end of fighting on the Western Front of World War I. The armistice took effect in 1918 at eleven o'clock in the morning—the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” Veteran’s Day, the official United States public holiday to honor military veterans, coincides with Armistice Day and Remembrance Day (also known as Poppy Day), a memorial day observed by the British Commonwealth of Nations member states to remember the members of the armed forces who have died in the line of duty.

The common poppy, Papaver rhoeas, is worn in many countries on Armistice Day in order to commemorate those who lost their lives during warfare. The poppy became the symbol of remembrance soon after the publication of “In Flanders Fields,” a war poem written by Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. The poem gives reference to the red poppies that grew over the graves of fallen soldiers:

Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

Papaver rhoeas, an annual herbaceous species in the Papaveraceae, has a long-lived soil seed bank that readily germinates in disturbed soils. The plant was readily observed blooming on the battlefields during the war. The species is believed to be native to southern Europe, North Africa, and temperate Asia, but has become naturalized outside of this range.

A specimen of Papaver rhoeas collected in 1910 by Herman Knoche in Montpellier, France.

The U.S. National Herbarium has databased nine specimens of Papaver rhoeasfrom its collections. These specimens range from Lebanon and Iraq to Spain and the Canary Islands, and they date from the 1890s to the 1970s. The specimen shown here was collected on 19 May 1910 by American botanist Herman Knoche in Montpellier, France.

11/06/2018

Alex White is a post-doctoral fellow with a joint appointment in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the Data Science Lab in the Smithsonian Office of Information. White is working with Laurence Dorr and Eric Schuettpelz at NMNH and Rebecca Dikow in the Data Science Lab on developing machine learning models for evaluating global scale patterns of trait diversity in digitized herbarium collections. White recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago where he studied the ecological and evolutionary drivers of Himalayan bird diversity gradients with a particular focus on biogeography. His research broadly concerns developing computational methods for combining local community data with macroscale data to evaluate contemporary and historical limits on diversity.

11/05/2018

Marcelo Pace and Andrew Rozefelds received an award in recognition of their recent paper describing the discovery of the first wood fossil of Vitaceae in the Southern Hemisphere. The Journal of Systematics and Evolution presents awards annually to recognize the papers published in JSE with important impact in systematics and evolution. The paper “The first record of fossil Vitaceae wood from the Southern Hemisphere, a new combination for Vitaceoxylon ramunculiformis, and reappraisal of the fossil record of the grape family (Vitaceae) from the Cenozoic of Australia” <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jse.12300> has won the JSE Outstanding Papers award.

External appearance of the permineralized stem of the fossil Austrovideira dettmannae. Note tessellate bark with vertically oriented fissures, similar to modern grape vines.

11/01/2018

In 1995 the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield (BDG) Program was in need of a new database manager. Judy Skog, then a Professor at George Mason University, recommended one of her students, Tom Hollowell, as a smart and capable person to take on the job. We hired him and we were quite surprised. Not only was he smart and talented at working with databases, he was also funny and optimistic; he loved music, environmental conservation, political activism, riding his bicycle to work, and of course, his family and friends.

Tom Hollowell at the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) meeting in Berlin, Germany (2016)

Tom was the BDG data manager from 1996 to 2005, responsible for a database of over 150,000 records, producing labels for incoming collections and exchange, and updating the database as identifications arrived. He also coordinated students and volunteers working with the BDG Program databasing and barcoding plant specimens at the U.S. National Herbarium that had been collected in the Guiana Shield region. Tom had a strong sense of teamwork and was always there to help find solutions to any problems. He never shied away from assisting staff and researchers with data inquiries or with troubleshooting programs such as ArcMap, Access, or EMu.

Tom Hollowell at Shell Beach, Guyana (2001).

As the Program expanded to include the animals of the Guiana Shield, Tom was instrumental in coordinating researchers from different disciplines and departments to produce the various BDG publications and projects. While working full-time Tom went back to college at night to pursue a Doctoral degree in Environmental Science and Public Policy at George Mason University, receiving his PhD in 2005. As part of his dissertation research Tom studied fire-disturbed mangrove ecosystems in the Shell Beach area of Guyana.

During his time with the Program Tom co-authored many of the BDG publications. We would have kept him forever, but he left for a good cause: becoming a key player in NMNH’s Office of Informatics Technology, helping make the museum’s new database systems function. Before he left he trained and mentored his replacement, Sara Alexander (BDG 2006-2012; now with ITIS). Although he moved up a floor he never lost his connection to Botany, and stopped by frequently… especially when we had food!